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Abolition in Context: the Historical Background of the Campaign for the Abolition of the Slave Trade

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Abolition in Context: the Historical Background of the Campaign for the Abolition of the Slave Trade Abolition in context: the historical background of the campaign for the abolition of the slave trade Jeffrey HOPES Université du Mans The abolition of the slave trade by the British Parliament in 1807 was one of a series of legislative measures which led progressively to the abandonment of the slave economy in British held territories, culminating in the abolition of the legal framework of slavery in 1833 and in 1838 when the apprenticeship system was ended.1 The whole process whereby first the slave trade and then slavery itself were abolished can only be understood if all the different contexts, economic, military, political, ideological, cultural and social in which it took place are taken into account. The constant inter-connection of these contexts precludes any simple reliance on single explanations for the abolition of the slave trade, however tempting such explanations may be. In briefly summarising the nature of this multiple contextualisation, I do not wish to enter the on-going and fraught debate on the reasons for the abolition of the slave trade but simply to present it as a multi-faceted question, one which, like so many historical events, takes on a different appearance according to the position – in time and space – from which we approach it. Abolition and us In this respect, the first context which needs to be mentioned is that of our own relationship to the issue of slavery. The bicentenary of abolition in 2007 has seen the publication of a flood of articles, books, exhibitions and radio and television programmes in Britain and abroad. Many of these are the work of white writers and historians. Viewed collectively they constitute a body of work in which commemoration of abolition and shame at the legacy of the slave trade are combined in a mixture of celebration and flagellation. Whilst at least some of the leaders of the abolitionist movement have been held up as models of moral and political probity, the slave ports of Bristol and Liverpool have been grappling with the painful legacy of a slave trade that constituted the very basis of their civic achievement. Much of this engagement involves reconsidering slavery in the context of twenty-first century British multiculturalism, provoking further, salutary friction between the ethos of tolerance and mutual comprehension (to which abolition can be claimed to have contributed) and the deep, persistent stigmata of slavery which remain embedded in British society. 1 The abolition of the slave trade was preceded notably by the 1799 act limiting the number of slaves who could be carried by British ships and by the 1806 Foreign Slave Trade Act. 12 REVUE FRANÇAISE DE CIVILISATION BRITANNIQUE – VOL. XV, N°1 The sheer topicality of the slavery question, its refusal to be relegated to the status of a purely historical problem, makes any claim to objectivity, however well- grounded in historical method and practice, problematic. The particular situation and identity of the historians who write about the question can never be forgotten, making the study of the slave trade and slavery, like that of the Shoah, fraught with ideological interrogation. The selection of source material, the respective weight given to different sorts of information, the construction of the narrative of abolition, all are inevitably open to accusations of bias. Yet whilst in many ways how we view slavery and the slave trade depends on where we stand and where we come from, the battle for the high ground of objective truth is always worth pursuing. Amongst the greatest legacies of both the earliest slaves to record their experiences and the first abolitionists is the painstaking accumulation of evidence, embodied in The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano or in the documents presented to Parliament by Thomas Clarkson and his witnesses. The first wrested the privilege of secular autobiography from the rich and the famous, whilst the second paved the way for similar future investigations into such questions as the Poor Laws, public health and education.2 The Atlantic slave trade Contexts are not explanations and this rapid overview does not attempt to enter the debates surrounding various causes of the abolition of the slave trade. Such debates – in particular that initiated by Eric Williams in 19443 – are on-going despite periodic attempts to put them to rest. They often revolve around the degree of importance to be accorded to the various contexts that will be evoked here. First among these contexts is the trans-Atlantic slave trade itself, a trade which dates back to the fifteenth century and in which England had participated since John Hawkins’s first slave voyage in 1562. Its first and most important characteristic is its international nature, involving as it did commerce between three continents carried on by a variety of European nations, in particular Spain, Portugal, Britain, France, Holland, Austria and Denmark. To these were added the American colonies who progressively began importing their slaves directly instead of from European traders. To the trans-Atlantic voyages we must add the commerce carried on within the Caribbean and between the islands and the American continent. Slaves were transported to the European nations’ respective colonial territories, the principal ones being Cuba (Spain), Brazil (Portugal), Saint Domingue, Guadeloupe and Martinique (France) the southern, Dutch Antilles (Holland), and the various British colonies of which Jamaica and Barbados held the largest slave populations. But slave traders from one country did not limit themselves to the carriage of slaves to their corresponding colonies. For example, after Spain ceded the Asiento to Britain following the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, British ships supplied the Spanish colonies, just as they sold to the French market in Saint Domingue at the end of the century. Indeed, carrying on the slave trade for other countries became a convenient way for British traders to avoid the restrictions placed on the number of slaves that could be 2 See Olaudah EQUIANO, The Interesting Narrative and other writings, Vincent CARRETTA (ed.), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003; Abstract of the Evidence delivered before a Select Committee of the House of Commons in the years 1790 and 1791, London: James Phillips, 1791. This is Clarkson’s condensed version of the evidence he collected. 3 Eric WILLIAMS, Capitalism and Slavery, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944. HOPES – ABOLITION IN CONTEXT 13 loaded per ship in 1799, just as American traders regularly circumvented the largely ineffectual attempts of different states to restrict the importation of slaves. Following the abolition of the British slave trade, campaigners protested against the use of flags of convenience which saw British crews continuing to operate with impunity. The slave trade was an increasingly deregulated trade in the second half of the eighteenth century. The South Sea Company, set up to manage Britain’s newly-won Asiento rights by purchasing slaves from the Royal African Company, was quickly faced with a parallel, ‘illegal’ trade involving not just other European traders but those from the newly developing slave ports of Bristol and Liverpool, the latter in particular specialising in unauthorised trade to the Spanish colonies. Even British attempts to impose heavy import duties on slaves disembarked in the American colonies proved increasingly difficult to administer. Whilst the slave trade was initially part of a mercantilist system to the extent that it constituted a profitable export trade in return for the goods (principally sugar) which came from Britain’s own colonies, it involved little in the way of bullion imports and encouraged a laissez-faire approach to tariffs. Even before Adam Smith attacked mercantilism in The Wealth of Nations the slave trade provided a potent example of deregulation. The so-called triangular trade, involving the export of British manufactured goods to Africa (of which arms from Britain and rum from America constituted an important part), the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the importation of sugar, tobacco and cocoa from the Caribbean was, at least in peace time, a mutually beneficial system of cheap European colonial imports made possible by the grotesquely imbalanced exchange in Africa of manufactured goods for a vast, cheap source of plantation labour. The effects of deregulation on the profitability of the slave trade and of the sugar plantations is still a matter of hot debate. In a curious and somehow rather perverse inversion of ideological expectations, it is West Indian and black American historians who assert the diminishing profitability of the sugar industry, whereas white American and European historians have broadly argued for its continued, or even increasing profitability during the period of abolition. The effect of the first argument is to minimise the impact of the European abolitionist campaigns and to link the demise of the slave trade to the rise of more profitable uses of capital, notably industrial production and the East India trade. The second credits social, religious, and political developments within Europe for the disappearance of the slave trade. The debate on profitability is often highly technical and involves both the use of theoretical models and projections and reference to contemporary documents. For our purposes it is sufficient to remark that the profitability of the slave trade, which was only partially linked to that of the sugar industry, itself depended on a number
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